Greetings friends of @ecoTrain, giving continuity to the previous publication, in this opportunity I wanted to share with all of you one of the most pleasant experiences that I have been promoting in our family garden, I comment that recently I decided to use recyclable plastic cups as seedbeds for the germination of Sweet Pepper, hence, this manuscript has been written from the experience, and aims to serve as a teaching tool, to disseminate ecological methods easily implemented.
Those of us who live in rural areas have certain advantages over people who live in large metropolises, one of these advantages is that generally in our homes we have open spaces where we can produce bio-products, establish seedbeds, as well as cultivate some plants of medicinal and food interest, the crops that we decide to plant will not guarantee our family food security, however, from the economic point of view we can save some resources, but the most relevant element is that this experience will make us grow in family values attached to nature, by implementing activities rooted in agro-ecological practices, which guarantee us healthy organic food free of synthetic traces.
Despite my theoretical knowledge in agroecology, I have little experience in establishing and managing orchards, basically because of the little free time I had previously to devote to this noble and rewarding work, a situation that changed since the beginning of the pandemic, context that has achieved that I can dedicate myself to execute ecological activities in the land that we have in our home, in this sense, it is important to emphasize that more than five months ago we sowed a sweet bell pepper seedling (Capsicum annuum), that we have been using as parental material to extract seeds.
To date, this noble seedling has already given us two harvests, in its first production I decided to select the fruits that showed better vigor and development, then with the help of a knife I extracted the seeds, then I placed and wrapped them in paper for five days, from there I placed them on a wooden table and put them in the sun for a whole day, this in order to expose them to the photons of light and thus reactivate their metabolic cycles.
To germinate the sweet bell pepper seeds, we do not use any technological package imposed by society (germination trays and commercial substrates), because basically what we did was to reuse recyclable plastic cups, and as a substrate we used an organic fertilizer obtained from our small compost, in order to obtain organic seeds under ecological methods.
With the help of my wife Alaiza and my daughter Luisana, every day first thing in the morning we applied water directly in each glass, fortunately all the seeds germinated, however, in the second, third and fourth week we could notice that some seedlings presented growth problems, however, we will not make practices of discarding therefore we will give it an additional time and then we will take them to definitive field in a couple of weeks.
With this publication, I sought to detail our pleasant experience in establishing seedbeds to germinate sweet bell pepper seeds, through the use of recyclable cups, and at the same time show them in a simple way how they can implement it in their homes, in order to appropriate popular and ecological knowledge, which will provide them with advantages to produce healthy food.